The present invention generally relates to electrical musical instruments, such as electric guitars, which might have single and/or dual coil pickups. It more specifically relates to a user interface and visual display which allows a user to readily change between different combinations of pickups where the particular pickup configuration is displayed on the front of the instrument.
Manufacturers have long striven to provide musicians with an ever-wider palette of sounds to choose from while playing electric guitar or similar musical instruments that employ transducers (generally magnetic pickups) to capture or translate the vibration of strings and induced instrument body resonances to an electrical signal of varying voltage for the purpose of signal amplification and manipulation into a musical creation. There exist three interrelated areas of electric stringed instrument design art that come into play in all attempts to achieve a novel, useful improvement to this end. These are:                1) A manageable set of the many various possible pickup (transducer) combinations, (wiring arrangements) typically pre-selected by the manufacturer.        2) Means for selecting amongst these various arrangements; e.g. toggle or rotary switches or other means.        3) A visual or other indicator of musician's selection, e.g., a large, easy to see (or feel) toggle switch.        
In recent years there have been a number of attempts to widen the electric-(or amplified)-stringed-instrument musician's access to a greater set of sounds resulting from more numerous pickup combinations. Many recent attempts to this end employ some form of logic-controlled-switching of the pickup interconnections, and intra-connections, to offer a greater number of possibilities than are practical or desirable through the use of strictly manually operated switches of any sort. To date these attempts have done one or the other of either limiting the number of musician selectable combinations through either a reduced set of the total possible combinations possible with a given instrument's compliment of pickups by:                A) Pre-limiting the total choices, or providing the user with assigned selectable “banks” of sounds via RAM or similar memory that may be set and then later called up by the user; depending on for instance, the type of song being played.        B) Offering a continuous dial or scroll-wheel through which the musician can dial-in a desired pickup combination.        
The drawbacks for Option A are that the musician is still working with a less than ultimate selection of pickup combinations to select from, though utilizing a somewhat manageable user interface. Even so, many of the attempts to do this require the user to memorize the push/pull knob settings with scant direct indication of the pickup combination selected. In other words, for example the musician/user must know that with the front knob pulled up, second knob down, and 5-way selector in position 2, the user has chosen the neck pickup in parallel with the other pickups in series. This approach requires a lot of toggling of the switches and a great deal of memorization.
The drawback for Option B, the use of a scroll-wheel or similar interface, is the difficulty of quickly selecting the desired pickup combination in real-time, such as doing so in the middle of a song. Because a desired pickup configuration may not be stored in adjacent or nearby positions of the scroll-wheel, the user is relegated to a scrolling hunt to find the desired pickup configuration.
Other efforts have been made to provide a musician-user with rapid access to different pickup configurations. These systems have employed either an overly large number of toggle switches, buttons, push/pull switches and/or knobs as a means of user interface. Moreover, the status displays of these systems have also been less than satisfactory. Some display the user's selection on a liquid-crystal display or similar display. The shortcoming with this type of display is that it is difficult to view on a stringed musical instrument, unlike the situation with an electric keyboard, where this type of display is perhaps more suitable. In particular, an electric guitar is often worn on a strap, and may be routinely subjected to sharp motions and shock, and is worn at a relatively great distance from the user's eyes. Other attempts have employed a veritable constellation of light emitting diodes (“LEDs”), arrayed about the instrument, as visual indication of the user selection. The problem with this type of display is that the user must employ a great deal of mental processing to ascertain the chosen pickup selection while simultaneously performing the musical work. This difficulty makes selection interactions and determination of pickup settings a tedious task.
The result of the systems described above has been less than satisfactory, in that these attempts have fallen short of providing an easy way for the musician to quickly switch to a different desired pickup configuration with surety and to know which pickup configuration is in effect at a given time.